Free tools

CPM ↔ CPC ↔ flat fee converter

Ad sellers price the same thing three ways — per thousand impressions, per click, or one fixed fee — so that offers are hard to compare. Enter each quote and the click rate you expect, and every price comes out per click and per thousand.

Ad copy A/B test calculator

Two versions of an ad, two click rates, one of them higher. This tells you whether the gap is large enough to act on, or the kind of difference that turns up between two identical ads by chance.

How many visitors a test needs

Most tests on a small site stop long before they could have said anything. Enter your conversion rate, the smallest improvement you would act on and your daily traffic, and see how long an honest answer takes.

Break-even CPC calculator

Every click is worth what the customers it produces are worth, multiplied by how often it produces one. Enter those and you get the bid ceiling above which advertising loses money.

ROAS and break-even ROAS

A 2× return sounds like a win until you remember the product costs money to make. This puts your ROAS next to the return your margin actually needs.

CTR calculator with benchmarks

A click-through rate from a few thousand impressions is an estimate, not a fact. This gives you the rate, the range the true rate probably sits in, and the benchmarks it can and cannot be said to beat.

Newsletter sponsorship cost calculator

A newsletter quotes a price per send and a subscriber count. What you are buying is the people who open it, and the few of those who click. This works out what each of those costs.

Podcast sponsorship cost calculator

Podcasts sell by the episode and report downloads. Enter the price and the downloads and this gives you the CPM to compare against other shows, and what each visit costs at the response rate you expect.

Sponsorship ROI calculator

After a sponsorship runs you have a cost, a click count and a rough idea of how many became customers. This turns those into a return — and says when the click count is too small for the return to mean much.

Startup marketing budget planner

The common mistake with a small budget is spreading it: a little on every channel, too little on each to show what worked. Enter your monthly budget and this funds at most two channels at the spend each needs to produce a readable result.

Ad frequency and fatigue checker

In a small audience the same people see the same ad again and again, and the click rate sags. Enter impressions, reach and the click rate at the start and now, and this says whether frequency is the likely cause.

Viewable impression calculator

An impression is counted when an ad is served, not when it is seen. Enter served and viewable impressions from your ad server and the CPM you paid, and this shows the price per thousand ads that could actually be seen.

Ad rate card generator

Most small publishers write "contact us for rates" because they do not know what to charge. Enter your audience and the CPM you want, and this builds prices you can publish today.

Media kit generator

A sponsor wants the same five facts from every publisher: who reads it, how many, how engaged, what it costs and how to book. Fill them in and copy out a kit.

Best time to advertise

Page views and ad click-throughs by hour of day from this board's own logs, rebuilt hourly.

Live ad price badge

One line of HTML showing what the top slot costs right now.

Advertising glossary

CPM to bidstream data, each term answered in its first sentence.